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The ugly truth about cloud computing in the enterprise

One surprising finding of Flexera’s RightScale 2019 State of the
Cloud report is that 84 percent of enterprises surveyed
have a multicloud strategy. No, it’s not
surprising that the number is so high. Rather, it’s surprising
that the number isn’t 100 percent. After all, the cloud has been
driven by developer convenience, and those same developers are
choosing services from different clouds, running them throughout
an enterprise.

It’s a convenient fiction that enterprises meant for this
sprawling cloud mess to happen.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at how this “strategic thinking” is
working out.

It’s the cloud all the way down to the data
center

RightScale polled 786 cloud professionals to figure out adoption
trends. As shown in Flexera’s data, enterprises are a bit all
over the map in terms of cloud strategy.

While all areas of cloud are growing, public cloud adoption
vastly outpaces private cloud, and the mingling of both public
and private cloud (hybrid cloud) beats them both as single
phenomenon. This makes sense, because companies are going big
with public cloud but need to find ways to rationalize those
investments against the sunk costs of their private data centers.

The primacy of public cloud in this hybrid mix becomes clear in
a Credit Suisse CIO survey, which
found that the Big 3 hybrid cloud vendors are Amazon Web
Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform—that is, the
Big 3 public cloud providers. It’s also telling that 51 percent
of these same respondents told Credit Suisse that they would be
shutting down most or at least a few of their data centers of the
next several years.

But this is where things stop to make sense.

Enterprise cloud teams: Where’s the governance?

While 94 percent of the companies RightScale surveyed claim to be
running workloads in the cloud, few of them seem to be doing it
particularly well. They may tout their hybrid cloud “strategy,”
for example, but when asked what their biggest challenges were,
the answer was “We can’t seem to get a handle on all this
adoption”—despite the fact that 66 percent of those surveyed said
they have a central cloud team, according to the Flexera survey.

Between a lack of governance and ability to keep cloud costs in
control is perhaps the root of it all: a lack of qualified
personnel. Or, spun a different way, these enterprises may have
plenty of qualified AWS, Azure, or GCP personnel, but they’re all
running siloed applications in siloed cloud deployments in the
enterprise. On average, enterprises are running five clouds,
spread between private and public clouds. If that sounds like
“strategy,” well, you’re not paying attention.

Oh, and by the way, the problems are only getting worse,
according to the Flexera survey.

Again, if you’ve ever worked in a large enterprise, none of these
findings will surprise you. Nor will it shock you to discover
that by far the biggest priority for these organizations is to
make better use (and wring cost savings from) existing clouds,
rather than to chase down new services at new clouds.

Finally, it should shock no one that surveying CIOs to uncover
the “strategy” driving cloud adoption is a bit of a lost cause.
Developers are the ones spinning up cloud infrastructure to
support applications they’re building. CIOs may try to
rationalize this after the fact as a multicloud or hybrid
strategy, but it’s really just an echo of something Billy
Marshall said years ago, with reference to open source adoption:
The CIO is the last to know.